Every organization takes extraordinary precautions to stop email-based threats like phishing and business email compromise (BEC). Fewer employ the same deep measures to prevent benign human error, like sending an email to the wrong “Tom.”

According to new research from Abnormal AI, they should.

For all the effort security teams spend defending against malicious inbound threats, a surprising share of data loss now begins inside the enterprise, through legitimate messages sent to unintended recipients. A single mistyped name, outdated distribution list, or misclicked autocomplete can expose confidential data in seconds. These mistakes may appear harmless, but they remain among the leading causes of enterprise data breaches worldwide.

To understand how organizations are managing this overlooked risk, Abnormal AI surveyed more than 300 security and IT leaders across industries and geographies. Participants represented companies ranging from 1,000 to over 25,000 employees, with roles spanning CISOs and CIOs to security architects and SecOps managers.

Their responses reveal an uncomfortable truth: misdirected email is nearly universal…and largely unmanaged.

• 96% of organizations experienced data loss or exposure from misdirected email in the past year.

• 95% reported measurable business impact, from remediation costs to compliance violations.

• 41% said they typically learn of these incidents only when the unintended recipient reports them.

• 97% believe behavioral AI represents the most effective path to prevention.

These findings form the foundation of the 2025 State of Misdirected Email Prevention report, which explores how enterprises are confronting this hidden source of data loss, where legacy controls fall short, and why AI-driven visibility is quickly becoming essential to outbound security.

For years, data loss prevention has focused outward on keeping adversaries out and sensitive data in. But the reality is that loss often begins with trusted employees doing ordinary work. Traditional data loss prevention (DLP) tools and secure email gateways (SEGs) were never built to interpret human intent. They rely on rigid rules and keyword matching, not contextual understanding, and therefore miss the subtle cues that distinguish routine communication from risky misdelivery.

Misdirected email doesn’t look like a breach. It looks like business as usual, until it isn’t.

Despite decades of investment in email security, the controls most organizations rely on appear to be inadequate in stemming accidental data loss. Traditional systems were built to detect malicious intent, not human error. While secure email gateways protect inbound traffic and DLP tools enforce static rules, neither understands the human context behind communication. And because these solutions generate a constant stream of false positives, security teams often find themselves drowning in alerts that do little to reduce real risk.

In fact, the average organization spends more than 400 hours each year managing false positives from current DLP or email security tools—time they could devote to strengthening defenses elsewhere. Yet despite all this effort, research tells us that misdirected emails continue to slip through unseen.

They can’t interpret why a message is unusual, only whether it matches a predefined rule. And in today’s world of distributed work, sprawling contact lists, and high-speed collaboration, those static parameters can’t keep up.

The data from Abnormal’s survey underscores how widespread—and costly—this problem has become. Nearly every participating organization experienced at least one misdirected email incident in the past year, and most faced significant consequences.

• 54% had to dedicate major time and resources to remediation.

• 49% experienced loss or exposure of confidential data.

• 40% reported damage to customer relationships.

• Many faced regulatory scrutiny or financial penalties under GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX compliance frameworks.

These aren’t one-off mishaps. They represent a systemic weakness in enterprise communication, one amplified by the speed and volume of modern collaboration. And while training and awareness remain valuable, the only way to reliably prevent these incidents is to understand them as they happen.

That’s where behavioral AI changes the equation.

Instead of relying on fixed rules, behavioral AI continuously learns each user’s normal communication patterns—who they contact, when, and about what—and identifies when a message falls outside that baseline. It brings the same intelligence that protects against sophisticated inbound threats to the outbound side of the equation, detecting risky anomalies before data leaves the organization.

Survey participants overwhelmingly recognized the potential of this approach:

• 97% agreed behavioral AI would increase a solution’s ability to detect risky data movements before they occur.

• 96% said it would reduce the burden of managing static rules and manual configuration.

• 94% believe it would significantly lower false positive rates.

Behavioral AI enables what legacy tools cannot: real-time, context-aware prevention that protects against both intentional and accidental data exposure.

The 2025 State of Misdirected Email Prevention report makes one conclusion clear: enterprises can no longer treat human error as an acceptable cost of doing business. Every outbound message carries the potential for data loss, and traditional defenses often aren’t equipped to stop it.

Behavioral AI represents the new foundation for outbound protection, one that delivers visibility, accuracy, and control without adding operational overhead. By understanding how people communicate and do business, it prevents mistakes before they become breaches.

The full report explores this evolution in detail, uncovering how leading organizations are using AI to close the outbound visibility gap and redefine what effective misdirected email prevention looks like.

Read the full 2025 State of Misdirected Email Prevention report to explore all findings and see how behavioral AI is transforming how enterprises keep sensitive data out of the wrong inboxes.